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the strategic expertise of a big brand with the creativity and agility of a startup

Confusing Confidence with Competence

One Question to Avoid Hiring Dunning Kruger as Your CMO Dunning Kruger is a term in psychology to describe how people often believe they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Since as a culture, we often confuse confidence with competence, when you're interviewing a potential CMO -- or anyone -- how do you know who’s really competent, and who’s just confident? Who flew standby on a rocket ship, and who landed a plane on the Hudson? Compounding the confusion is that the value of a trusted "brand", unfortunately, extends beyond personal purchasing decisions into screening, interviewing, and selecting senior level executives. Recruiters, HR directors, and boards find it easier to

Do You Have a Prototype or an MVP?

In a recent post on Linked In, Rand Fishkin, SEO pioneer and founder of Moz, described what happens when you launch a bad MVP. While I agree with Rand's point, I disagree that a lousy MVP is really an MVP at all -- it's a prototype. An MVP is a product with a core group of raving fans (like the Seahawk fans below). It's not a working prototype. It was developed from a series of build-test-learn cycles that started with a prototype. The product is truly unique, and customers are desperate for it. It has a high NPS or a bimodal one. Not sure? Schedule a quick call.

The Beginners Guide to PPC

An excellent resource brought to you by DiscoSloth, a search marketing company. At 84 pages, it's a long read, but worth reading and saving.

Podcast Advertising - 10 Questions to Ask

We have entered the golden age of podcasting. Listeners now have a wide variety of high quality, deeply engaging programming to choose from, and listen habitually at high rates of completion. So marketers have begun to take notice, driving ad spending on podcasting 86% over 2016. However podcasting still remains a relatively uncluttered advertising environment, as measured by my "clutter ratio", calculated by dividing the % of consumers using a medium, by the % of media dollars spent on it. With 26% of the population listening to podcasts on a habitual basis, and only .15% of media dollars spent on it, podcasting has a clutter index of 173, meaning its 173x less cluttered than you would expe

UnBEARable - Lessons From Build-A-Bear

There is nothing more powerful in retail than a line out the door. Like the McDonald's 1 million burgers sold sign or the number of reviews in an app store, lines out the door provide what Robert Cialdini calls "social proof", the phenomenon by which we do what other people do simply because we think they know better. Which means, the lines outside the Build-A-Bear stores for it's recent "Pay Your Age" promotion only accelerated sales by causing more customers to join the line. This in turn, generated unprecedented news and PR in arguably a low point in modern retail history, in the lowest sales month of the year for most retailers, bringing a refreshing flow of traffic to empty, air conditi

the strategic expertise of a big brand, the creativity and agility of a startup
www.sharonmccarthy.com